Swanage to Wareham: no summer service
TIMETABLED passenger services between Wareham and the seaside resort of Swanage in Dorset will not resume until September, after the peak summer season. They had been planned to operate from May.
On June 13 last year, scheduled trains from the heritage railway ran onto the South Western Main Line at Wareham for the first time since British Rail closed the branch line in 1972.
It had taken £5.5 million funding from a range of stakeholders to bring the line back to passenger railway standards, reopening a link that had been broken for 45 years.
Plans to use Swanage Railway’s own Class ‘117’ and ‘121’ diesel multiple units did not come to fruition in time, and the business had to charter West Coast Railways to provide a service. Now it is clear the heritage DMU units will not be ready this summer either.
They have been at Eastleigh works since 2014, where contractor Arlington Fleet Services is fitting the train with modern central door locking, TPWS warning system and GSM-R radio equipment to enable it to share Network Rail tracks with South Western Railway’s mainline service between Weymouth and London Waterloo.
Arlington’s work will not be completed until May, following which there will be a period of testing and crew training.
Swanage Railway’s director of Project Wareham, Mark Woolley, told RAIL: “We are now talking about September. We will miss the summer holiday season. It is taking longer than we anticipated. The train is looking good but there is a delay with new wheelsets.
“This was established as a twoyear trial service but we will now give a commitment to run in 2019 as well. The intention was to run for 90 days this summer, so we will now also run for 90 days next year.”
It’s not the first postponement of the project. The intention had been to operate in 2016, but delays to infrastructure work and to the trains led to a year’s delay.
When it became clear Swanage Railway’s vehicles were far from operational, the decision was taken to hire in Class 33 D6515 (33012) and WCR 37518 to haul four WCR coaches, which were later replaced by London Underground’s 4TC unit. They ran four services a day in each direction for 60 days.
Woolley said: “We were very
happy with what West Coast Railways did last year but it does not stack up financially to repeat the idea. We will not use them again in that way.”
Swanage Railway had welcomed occasional excursion trains since 2009. The track remained in place as a three-mile link from Worgret Junction, one mile west of Wareham, to Furzebrook for clay trains and to Wytch Farm oilfield. The line speed was raised from walking pace to 25mph in April 2016.
New signalling was required at Wareham and Worgret Junction, with the heritage signal box at Corfe Castle connected to Network Rail’s Basingstoke signalling centre more than 60 miles away.
Purbeck District Council and Dorset County Council provided £3.2 million of the cost of Project Wareham. There was a £1.8 million contribution from the government’s Coastal Communities Fund.
A new level crossing was built west of Norden station on the access road to Wytch Farm. It was funded by a £500,000 ‘legacy’ donation from BP, the former owner of the oilfield.
The Swanage Railway carried more than 200,000 passengers last year. The local councils estimated the heritage railway boosts the Purbeck economy by £14 million a year. A park and ride service from Norden is said to remove 40,000 cars a year from the slow and narrow A351 road between Corfe Castle and the coast.
In 2017, passengers paid £15 for the round trip on the ten-mile route between Wareham and Swanage, with the journey taking 45 minutes each way.
More significant hurdles remain. The Swanage Railway must obtain an Office of Rail and Road exemption from railway regulations to enable the heritage DMU trains to run on the main line.
Woolley said: “We have exchanged correspondence and put forward all the risk mitigation. There is a meeting with ORR next month. A Class 121 unit was in use with Chiltern Railways until very recently [May 19 2017].
“Our Class 117 is constructed the same way: it is a multi-unit version of a similar design. ORR will consult with Network Rail but there is no suggestion that it would refuse that type of train permission to operate, provided we comply with all the safety regulations.”
Class 117s were built by the Pressed Steel Company at Linwood in Scotland from 1959 to 1961.
Woolley, who has been a Swanage Railway volunteer for 30 years, admitted the railway’s funding partners are “disappointed” with the further delay. But he said they remained supportive of the scheme.
“The trial is not just about getting the maximum income at the busiest time of the year,” he said. “We are committed to running our trains when we can. We want a sustainable longterm development of a service: that is the key message. We wanted to start in late spring, but it’s not the end of the world.”